Gateway Community College

New Haven, Connecticut, USA

College faces become large-scale art

Each day when students pass from building to building at Gateway Community College, they are treated to photos of their classmates, professors, and administrators on a 9 m by 9 m (30 ft by 30 ft) LED screen. This piece of lighting art, appropriately named "College Faces," is a slow-motion movie that transitions every thirty seconds between photos retrieved from smartphones or a website.

Conventional lights were ruled out because they can't produce full-color video, so an LED lighting solution was chosen to bring this concept to life. Color Kinetics iColor Flex LMX, strands of full-color LED nodes, were positioned 95 mm (4 in) apart on a custom-made frame by RGB Lights, Inc. placed in the atrium space connecting the campus buildings.

The installation was completed in September 2012. Cameron McNall, principal at Electroland and lighting designer for the project, was satisfied that he chose a Color Kinetics solution. McNall said the "wide product line [offered by Color Kinetics] allowed us to find a product that most clearly matched our needs, and they offered invaluable technical support."